You'll have to be your own judge on these shows as I did not watch much if any episodes.Ask yourself one question. " Did the classroom or school play a predominant role or was it just scenery and background."Think of the spirit of the topic.

Steve, great choice. When my kids were younger I used them as an excuse to watch Recess.

SQUARE PEGS and THE PAPER CHASE come to mind as favorites when I was young.

I really like the handful of episodes I have seen of COMMUNITY. That show's humor would be right up my alley, but I have generally stayed away from shows set in schools because I work at a school - it's not a setting I want to visit when watching TV!

Welcome Back, Kotter sprang to mind on reading the subject, so that has to go first.

Stellvia, an anime, the best students are sent to an academy in space to learn the skills to protect the planets from the wave of destruction coming from a supernova. (The skills involve piloting giant robots as a point defense against the heaviest pockets of the wave... it's an anime.) My daydream in school: that I would be learning stuff more directly applicable to something way cooler. A mix of the cool stuff and low-key rivalry, romance, failure, coping.

Don't know what to put for the third.I watched Room 222 and The Paper Chase, but I was probably too young for them. I remember there was some comedy I have rather watched that half overlapped with The Paper Chase, and my brother decided in his legal and mathematical wisdom that it would be fair for me to watch 20 minutes of the half-hour show, and for him to watch 40 minutes of the hour show.I watched The Magic Schoolbus when my nieces were young. My sister and I agreed it was better than "our" version: a cartoon called Mission: Magic. There was another Saturday morning show about school: Big John, Little John, about a teacher who got a drink from the fountain of youth that only worked intermittently. He'd turn into a student-aged kid and try to pass himself off as his cousin Oliver... probably led a whole generation to believe a double identity would never work.

Boston Public - I really liked this show (created by David E. Kelly), in part because it interacted with David's other shows (The Practice and Boston Legal), though it fell off the rails toward the end. The first season was the best of the run

The Paper Chase - Kingsfield, of course, was the highlight for me, as he was the lynch pin that carried over from the movie to the TV series. The students (Hart, Ford and Bell) remained constant throughout the series as well. It was a must-see for my wife and I.

The Bronx Zoo - Ed Asner was the principal of this High School. In many ways, it was similar to Boston Public, though this show ran in 1987, or 13 years before Boston Public made it to the airways. It only lasted one season.

I loved Head of the Class as a kid. Even back then, I could tell it wasn't as good a show as, say, Cheers or Newhart, but it was a very solid, well-executed B-level sitcom, that didn't get lazy the way a lot of other shows of that era did. Looking at it now, I can see that it often treated history as trivia ("But did you know Fidel Castro first wanted to be a baseball player?!?!"). Taking that same kind of attitude kind of screwed up my own ability to learn in later history classes, but I can't blame the show for that. Still, for whatever reason, the show really stuck in my head all these years. Moments from it pop into my head at random much more often than other shows from my youth.

Boston Public was an interesting show. It was clearly cast from a group of talented actors who'd all recently had their other shows cancelled. Chi McBride from the John Larroquette Show; Fyvush Finkel from Picket Fences; Jeri Ryan from Voyager... It was like some sort of bizarre greatest hits album.

Does anyone else recall the short-lived series Hull High? It was a musical from around the same era as the oft-derided Cop Rock. I remember it mainly on the basis of one musical number alone; the show's main character, Mr. Deerborn, nervously sits in on a class taught by his love interest, Donna Breedlove, as she sings the students a song about vowel sounds called "Soft and Round." Hokey smokes... I was agog... As I recall, there wasn't much else to recommend the program, but that one number alone was enough to seer it forever into my memory. Nancy Valens, flirtatious and engaging in red pvc, sliding suggestively down a gigantic nursery school primer... woof...

The only 3 classroom shows I watched regularly. And as much as I like Billy Connolly, Head of the Class should have ended when Howard Hessman left. But that wasn't the problem. The new students just weren't that interesting.

(Mr. Hague, I believe I watched the first episode of Hull High, but that was it.)

I liked HEAD OF THE CLASS, mostly for the students. Hesseman's Charlie Moore got on my nerves, played as a toned-down George Carlin wannabe. Connolly was a breath of fresh air. I didn't care for the student re-shuffling later on, however, and five years really was too long for a high school show.

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